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By Staff As part of a new national initiative, Maine will receive up to $100,000 in grant funding and other support to accelerate COVID-19 workforce recovery. Maine was selected as one of the first nine states in the Workforce Innovation Network, a joint initiative of the National Governors Association and Cognizant U.S. Foundation. The state will receive a grant to improve employment outcomes in response to the economic impacts of COVID-19, connecting job seekers to training, education, job opportunities and essential support services, according to a news release. “There are good-paying jobs in the trades, in electrical and plumbing work, in construction and manufacturing, in health care and life sciences and in clean energy that are going unfilled,” Gov. Janet Mills said in the release. “Our economic recovery depends on our ability to connect Maine workers to those jobs.” ....
While race- and ethnicity-based economic inequality long predates the pandemic, disparities have widened over the past year, economist Jeff Fuhrer told a Mainebiz virtual forum on Thursday. Fuhrer, a former top official at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, is now executive vice president and chief strategy officer at MassDevelopment, that state s finance and development agency. In his opening keynote of the Five on the Future discussion, Fuhrer questioned whether the United States is the land of opportunity it purports to be, saying, I d like to believe that s true, but we re pretty far from that. Backing up that point, he cited 2018 data showing discrepancies in income distribution for Black and Latino families versus white families. ....
Economist Jeff Fuhrer, a former executive vice president and senior policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, has for the past several years been the keynote speaker at the Mainebiz “Five on the Future” event. He is now executive vice president and chief strategy officer at MassDevelopment, the finance and development agency for Massachusetts. Mainebiz caught up with him to ask him for his outlook for 2021. Mainebiz: How early last year did economists start to see trouble signs with COVID-19? Jeff Fuhrer: There were of course some early rumblings about the coronavirus in late 2019 and early 2020. But almost no one saw the pandemic coming, let along the economic upheaval that it ultimately caused. Looking ahead, the jury is still out on how long that recovery will take and indeed, on how much damage the second surge will do. My sense is that by mid-2021, with the vaccine becoming widely distributed, confidence will begin to return, and spending on the har ....
While last year was a year we’ll never forget, no one seems quite certain what this year will look like.
But we know that whatever 2021 brings, Maine business leaders will be better prepared to deal with it. After a year marked by the pandemic, economic shutdowns, high unemployment, protests over cases of police brutality and a contentious presidential election, people have honed their adaptation skills. ....